This text was written in response to Brian Mather’s film, The Biodiversity Challenge. It is part of a wider project including creative responses to the Boghall Burn – part of the University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush campus, by the Pentland Hills.
The film is available here.
Two people walk together through a woodland plot. They are paying careful attention to the landscape. One of them is pointing out details and telling the story of the place. There is an exchange – an imparting of knowledge, a transfer of information. But reception is active. Ideas are shared and tested out. Bodies move through and into an environment. We don’t know what is said, but the conversation is expansive, generous, open. Words are sent out into this site with arms stretched wide, heads turned up and out to the trees and the adjoining fields. A stainless-steel coffee mug accompanies them on their journey.
These visitors are not alone. The briefest of unguarded glances towards the camera reminds us of this. Somebody is circulating – moving around the pair and capturing their conversation from different angles and distances as they walk. Sometimes they are followed at ground-level, as though a predator is silently closing in on them as they progress, unaware, through the site. Sometimes, the camera operator has raced up ahead and captures their approach. The pair advance without looking directly at the camera. They have learnt to ignore its presence – to fix their gaze on the lichen and leaves, to concentrate on the nonhuman actors in this scene.
And the camera follows their attention, attending to a rotting branch, a dandelion, a flowering gorse, pebbles at the edge of the waterway, a ewe with her lambs, a flighty roe deer, a pair of foxes, moss on bark, fly-tipped corrugated iron, and a wire perimeter fence. We peer into a badger sett. Down into the darkness of subterranean lives. Interspersing the fragments of this fieldtrip, there are also grainy nocturnal shots of mammalian inhabitants. Glowing eyes and furtive passage.
The materiality of this place asserts itself through close ups, camera traps and tracking shots. We are brought close to the earth, sensing the damp, muddy, tangled textures of mycorrhizal networks and plant roots, stretching through the soil. The detail is everything here. But we are never allowed to get lost in it. We are never allowed to dwell.
The camera lifts above the trees. An impossible manoeuvre. Suddenly, a drone shot takes us somewhere that the walkers cannot reach. We see the bigger picture. Edinburgh’s hills in the distance, the A702 passing over the burn and bordering the site. People are constantly passing by, but they may not know of the grasses and the sparrowhawks, the antlers and the birch. This is a place that is hemmed in, parcelled out, and largely left alone. And that’s what the walkers do now. A linear chronology has brought us to the end of the path and the pair pass back into the everyday, leaving the wood to its more-than-human presences and processes, to its secret rhythms and refrains.
Boghall Old Beech (https://skfb.ly/pBVEX)
